In general, digital rights management refers to a field of access control technology that attempts to prevent against improper use of proprietary content such as video, audio, etc.
One way to prevent misappropriation of proprietary content is to encrypt the content before it is made available or distributed over a network to an end user operating a playback device. By itself, encrypted content is not particularly useful because it must first be decrypted in order to play it back on a respective playback device. In order to enable a subscriber to play back encrypted segments of a title of content, it is required to provide the respective user of the playback device one or more decryption keys along with the encrypted content such that the playback device is able to decrypt the encrypted content and play back the original content on a respective display screen.
In certain instances, conventional techniques enable a respective client device to retrieve encrypted content and then, via trans-cryption, store a re-encrypted version of the content for later use. However, in such an instance, this requires the client device to decrypt the content using appropriate decryption keys and then apply new encryption to the content prior to storing it for later use. This is often undesirable because of the time requested to decrypt and encrypt again.